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It takes long time for the layoff effects to hit the company. The main effect is that you lose the trust of the top performers. These will be the in the lookou

It takes long time for the layoff effects to hit the company. The main effect is that you lose the trust of the top performers. These will be the in the lookout for new opportunities the day after the layoffs are done. If you cut 10%, expect 10% from the top to flee within a couple of years. The second effect is related to the fact that companies usually target older people with expensive jobs. In an a big org these are the wizards who have the unwritten cookbooks in their brains. When they leave en masse, a lot of the organizational memory is gone, and expensive operational mistakes of the past are forgotten. These have longer effects that will haunt the company for many years. The only way you can safely pull off layoffs is if you ensure that anything you do in the company requires the experience of a boot camp. That means that everyone is fungible and you can easily swap them. And this is what tech did better than any other industry. The average required know-how depth of a tech white collar worker is easily two three levels below when compared to other industries. Pharma and chemicals come to mind from personal experience.

pclmulqdq 4y ago
I think this is the logic that can make a company like Citadel, which fires 10% of their staff per year, work out well. If you have no expectation of job safety, it attracts a certain kind of person, but there's also no love lost if a layoff round is a little bigger than normal.
- xyzelement 4y ago
  Exactly. I worked at a Citadel like fund and that's the vibe. The calculus was like this - I'd rather risk being fired than work in a place where low performers are cozy. The reality is that working at a place like that or a FAANG for just a few years sets you up for a great career no matter what happens. So even if you get fired after a few years you are still better off. It's good to have coworkers who can think rationally and make decisions this way, too. It's a virtuous cycle.
  - anon20230209 4y ago
    I bet people like that drift into voluntary unpaid overtime.
    - lelanthran 4y ago
      > I bet people like that drift into voluntary unpaid overtime. Drift? I think you mean Sprint.
    - xyzelement 4y ago
      Or, equivalently, "people like that are paid a lot and are engrossed in their careers." When someone makes $500k+, what does "unpaid overtime" even mean?
      - _cenw 4y ago
        I wouldn't want my $500k+ engineer to even remotely get close to burning themselves out.
      - sofixa 4y ago
        > When someone makes $500k+, what does "unpaid overtime" even mean? It means shit work/life balance, thus missing on a lot of people that would want to have it and results in worse productivity (people need time off or they break).
        cj 4y ago
        > It means shit work/life balance Solution: take a job that doesn't pay $500k. I hate this saying and rarely say it, but "you can't have your cake and eat it too" No one should take a $500k job and expect the culture to be 9-5, clock in clock out. It takes most people 10+ years to earn $500k (often still working their asses off overtime). $500k is a shit ton of money.
      - mynameisvlad 4y ago
        Money doesn’t magically make burnout go away. In fact, it will make it worse, because you’ll keep telling yourself to hold on for the money while your mental health exponentially deteriorates.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
nordsieck 4y ago
> The main effect is that you lose the trust of the top performers. These will be the in the lookout for new opportunities the day after the layoffs are done. If you cut 10%, expect 10% from the top to flee within a couple of years. I don't know, but I imagine that there's a pretty substantial difference between an isolated layoff and an industry wide layoff. Maybe it hits differently when you get to see the sausage made. Where is a top performer at Google going to go? I'm sure there's some companies out there that aren't doing layoffs right now, but most of those probably can't offer FAANG/MANGA salaries.
- nostrademons 4y ago
  Startups. Top performers at Google, if they've been smart about their finances, are sitting on a few million in the bank and have runways between ~10 years to infinity. They can afford to work for equity for a few years to take a slice of the pie when the company takes over another industry.
  - thwayunion 4y ago
    Exactly. My own pet theory about this round of layoffs is as follows. The tech companies spent 2021 massively over-estimating the value of boot camp folks and new grads. They spent 2022 learning a tough lesson. I saw this first hand. So much lost time mentoring low-quality hires. Now they will spend 2023 massively underestimating the value of their senior folks (10+ yoe engineers, scientists with deep domain expertise, experienced people managers, etc.). The problem in 2024-2026 will be that experienced engineers/managers and PhDs who know how to operate well in industry do not grow on trees. Fixing that mistake is going to be a LOT harder than firing a bunch of junior engineers. It may take a decade or longer, and I think the burnt bridges could even be existential for at least one of the FAANGs. (I also bet you'll guess a different one than me, so maybe more than one ;-)) Also: the alternative is not just startups. Smaller companies, sole props, and of course also skiing. I am getting very close to that "~10 years to infinity" number in my accounts. I might do a startup, probably self-funded, likely keep it small. I know who my first 5 customers will be, the work will be fun, I know I can execute well. Doing this at a FAANG would require pulling in 20+ full timers for a year before shipping our first line of code. Totally not worth the ridiculous pageantry when I can do it on my own or with 1-2 helping hands. I'll be making a tiny fraction of what I make today, but the work will be enjoyable and I'll be building what I've wanted to build for the last ten years. Also, I will own the damn thing, which is much more tax-efficient than taking a few years of massive paychecks, and that's something I am more sensitive to now that my money is making so much money. If I were laid off today, I'd need at least double my current comp to return to a FAANG. And even then probably wouldn't.
djkivi 4y ago
> The only way you can safely pull off layoffs is if you ensure that anything you do in the company requires the experience of a boot camp. That means that everyone is fungible and you can easily swap them. This is an interesting way to think of the Leetcode style interview. If you don't require any particular experience and you have built your company's systems in a way that any "competent" developer can join and be effective, layoffs may not be such a big problem.
- CharlieDigital 4y ago
  This is why React is so popular; not because it is inherently good or performance or has great DX but because of how easy it is to swap one so-so React dev for another so-so React dev.
  - mikepurvis 4y ago
    Cynically, aren’t corporate blub languages like Java and Go kind of built on the same notion? That is, they intentionally limit the amount of complexity possible so that there is a low ceiling for mastery and workers are interchangeable.
    - urthor 4y ago
      They're used in that fashion, yes.
    - CharlieDigital 4y ago
      The bar for React and Java are very different. Before you mention that one is a UI library and the other is a programming language: that's my point. There are a lot of FE devs that work backwards from React to JS/TS.
  - tukantje 4y ago
    People who are not frontenders regularly look at frontend and think it is easier / simpler to work with. If anything, complexity grew like an atom bomb.
- 4y ago
atomicnumber3 4y ago
I worked at a bigco that followed this approach. I think the alleged fungibility of programmers is surface-level. Sure - ~any decent programmer can jump into ~any codebase and do your JIRA tickets. But there's a more holistic ownership you miss out on that's going to be the difference between a system aging gracefully and a system becoming a giant hunk of butchered junk that's been one-small-jira-ticket-ed to death over a decade and now needs a very costly and distracting replacement/rewrite. I worked at a different company that did the opposite of this. Programmers were expected to stay either 1 year or 10 years, and you'd be compensated according to which bucket you were falling into. They had excellent retention rates, and the dev team was small, <30 engineers. We never rewrote systems. They had owners who had either written them, or been handed off apprenticeship-style over the course of a year or two from the former master to the new master. Place 1 was a fucking mess of tech debt and had constant incidents that made high value customers mad, execs mad, and oncall engineers mad. One of my coworkers literally went into his first oncall shift, got paged at night three times in two days, and resigned the next morning when he found out that yeah this is just kind of normal and good luck convincing leadership to let us fix it. Place 2 literally never had tech incidents. The worst oopsies were generally related to (it was a trading shop) other people in the market fucking up and resulting in trade breaks that we had to clean up after hours, or exchanges having problems and sending us garbage data that we had to resolve by calling someone from the exchange to confirm order statuses and so on. I only left place 2 because I was moving across the country and they didn't do remote (and still don't, even post covid). I was laid off from place 1.
- neilv 4y ago
  > One of my coworkers literally went into his first oncall shift, [...], and resigned the next morning I've seen people nope right out of there, and (anecdotally) it's always been an experienced person seeing something that was worse than they should've expected, and having an idea how unusually bad it is.
  - outside1234 4y ago
    I did this at Netflix when I saw their (then) HTML mobile app. Yikes. Moving on to option #2.
ptero 4y ago
I am not sure about this (not disagreeing, just not sure). First, 10% of top performers out in 2 years is a normal attrition rate for a 20 year tenure. And I suspect mean time at the company is much lower. But even more important, I think most top performers understand and accept the risk that their employment may end. For example, the company can fold. It is easier for top engineers to accept that because they likely have better connections and can pretty easily find a good job elsewhere. My 2c.
softwaredoug 4y ago
> The second effect is related to the fact that companies usually target older people with expensive jobs. In an a big org these are the wizards who have the unwritten cookbooks in their brains. When they leave en masse, a lot of the organizational memory is gone, and expensive operational mistakes of the past are forgotten. These have longer effects that will haunt the company for many years. Is this true this round? I have noticed a few things: * On the hiring front, much more demand for senior, staff, principal devs, less demand on the junior / intern front. * (Anecdotally) A LOT of junior / new people laid off. It seems in this round companies want a small but elite force, rather than opting for junior people.
- napsec 4y ago
  Companies have always preferred to hire experienced ICs. They hired juniors because they couldn't find or afford more senior people. It does seem that a lot of juniors are being impacted. But the hiring front likely reflects the fact that there are now more senior folks in the market, and likely that they can offer lower salaries since job seekers have less leverage.
lelanthran 4y ago
> The only way you can safely pull off layoffs is if you ensure that anything you do in the company requires the experience of a boot camp. That means that everyone is fungible and you can easily swap them. Yes, and that's the number one thing successful small business owners learn. The ones who don't learn this aren't successful. You want as many of your staff as possible to be easily replaced. If you're running a restaurant, do you really want the success of your restaurant to hinge on a single talented chef? Nope. You make sure that there's a process so that another few chefs can drop in quickly without changing the menu or the quality of the food. All the other kitchen staff don't do "complicated", they follow instructions. If the business depends on having developers that are in the top 5% (say, one of the criteria to working on the code is understanding Haskell with Monads), the business is at constant risk because the developers are not easily replaceable.
- saurik 4y ago
  While they certainly have some people who are cogs, all of the small businesses I know are heavily reliant on their owner constantly being around being that person and putting in soul-crushing hours, though, as they can't rely on anyone else and yet simply aren't large enough to have the entire business be built out of cogs. A result of this is that they are businesses that are fundamentally trapped at their current size because of this reliance on their size, and I will claim the only way they grow is by figuring out how to bring on other dedicated strong people to help them get some horizontal scale. I honestly don't think you can try to do the "everyone is a cog" thing until you are at least a medium-sized business.
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  You are talking about a Franchise model. At a good nice restaurant the individuals recognize me as an individual. You can't just drop someone in and have them know what I like or the service I am used to. You can make yourself a McDonalds, but you better not have any large customer contracts because they are not compatible with the 'franchise' everyone can do everything model (because they expect individualized attention, and often individualized features).
eriktrautman 4y ago
Depends on the environment. In a startup, the top performers often say basically “what took you so long? Glad we can move faster now. And try to hire some more top performers for me to work with.”
waynesonfire 4y ago
> The main effect is that you lose the trust of the top performers. Why? top-performers are most positioned to be aware of incompetence around them and may in fact welcome a housing cleaning. With that said, it's not always easy to identify who's who-- it's possible top-performs are affected or incompetence isn't, which can erode trust.
- Tao3300 4y ago
  > top-performers are most positioned to be aware of incompetence around them and may in fact welcome a housing cleaning That's thinking from a notch or two below top-performance. Top performers know what's "in the wheel house" for others around them and how to use it optimally. Don't be fooled by local maximums!
  - waynesonfire 4y ago
    i don't know if i agree, stocks usually increase after layoffs.
- pjmorris 4y ago
  There are many factors involved in employee assessment of employer suitability. Steve Blank has observed [0] that when top employees recognize that when an employer moves to assessing them from a purely financial perspective, it's time to go. https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-earth-%E2%80%93-soda%E2%80%99s-are-no-longer-free/ https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
hardware2win 4y ago
Why would actual top performers care this much if they would find new job easily + theyre probably not being targeted
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  A wild guess: - The people let go might have been good friends or at least people they enjoyed working with. - While they’re not targeted, their coworkers are, they’ll sympathize with the tension. Also that workforce is now doing the same work amount with fewer people. - They are expected to do a lot of education and bringing people up to speed. More churn means more work, and it’s also harder emotionally if you’re not sure how long the person will stay in the company.
  - hardware2win 4y ago
    >Also that workforce is now doing the same work amount with fewer people. Not always. Sometimes projects are killed, so amount of work stays the same, or even better - some people are moved to help other teams
- willcipriano 4y ago
  You typically are asked to work longer hours to make up for missing staff, deal with a lot of nonsense and get "at least you didn't get laid off" as a reward at the end of it. When the money people turn out their pockets (become low performers in their role) no point in sticking around or at very least, no reason to coutinue to be a high performer when the business is signaling its going to be a low performer in regards to the value its going to be able to deliver to you.
  - hardware2win 4y ago
    >You typically are asked to work longer hours to make up for missing staff In my country that would be illegal
clnq 4y ago
> The main effect is that you lose the trust of the top performers. These will be the in the lookout for new opportunities the day after the layoffs are done. If you cut 10%, expect 10% from the top to flee within a couple of years. I've been through one of the tech layoffs that happened during the pandemic, so N=1 and all, but this was exactly what happened. On the day of the layoffs, few top performers were affected. It was a classic layoff with an HR email and immediate lockout. Managers of affected people learned later. Some people learned they were being laid off after hearing it in mainstream media first. After 6 months, many best performers (more than 10% in my opinion) have left after struggling with low morale. A lot of company knowledge was lost, portions of the codebase became unmaintainable, projects went from being certainly doable to being in perpetual uncertainty about cancellation. The responsibilities of the the top performers fell on less experienced people, some received promotions but buckled under the pressure in disruptive ways. Two years later, the company is still rebuilding but has obvious competency gaps. There was also difficulty in filling them because HR was disproportionally affected by layoffs. The distrust in management persists and more than a few people are openly talking about leaving. Though the hiring in tech has cooled down which had a chilling effect on people leaving, too.
foobiekr 4y ago
Top performers are pets. You use layoffs to generate excess opex savings in order to retain them. You guys are acting like companies are too dumb to think of these very basic concepts. I have personally witnessed discussions that can roughly be described as “ok we need to add an extra three people in order to fund retention for X.”
ISL 4y ago
Things might be a little different regarding losing trust of top-performers when layoffs happen broadly across a sector. If every semiconductor manufacturer reduces headcount by N%, there may not be much incentive for an engineer to jump ship. If only one of those companies doesn't lay anyone off, though, the dynamics are completely different.
WalterBright 4y ago
> If you cut 10%, expect 10% from the top to flee within a couple of years. If the company was laying off the deadwood and the quiet quitters, the top performers know who they are, and are not concerned about being laid off themselves. Top performers don't particularly care to work with deadwood and quiet quitters, either.
- munificent 4y ago
  > If the company was laying off the deadwood and the quiet quitters That's a big if, though. Executives doing layoffs also tend to do them quickly and plan them in secret in order to reduce the chance leaks. That means they are deciding who to cut with very limited time and information. They make lots of mistakes. Both times I've been through large layoffs, I saw skilled respected peers get the axe while deadwood didn't. It causes the loss of valuable employees and completely destroys respect for executives who are apparently so clueless that they don't even know which of their employees are worth keeping around.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    The RIFs I've been through did a good job culling the deadwood and quiet quitters. Everybody knew who they were. Of course, every company is different.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    As someone sometimes in that position, if I can get 85-90% accuracy (in both directions), I think that’s about the best I can possibly do in a 500-ish person organization. I hate the false positive (including a good performer incorrectly beyond that required by the depth of layoff) more than anything else for its deep unfairness to the individual, the team, and the company.
- projectazorian 4y ago
  It's rare that "deadwood" and "quiet quitters" do literally zero work. Even if you feel that your job is secure, you might not appreciate having their work dumped into your lap, especially since there's a good chance that it's not critical-path work. And you might not want to be in an environment where morale is low and trust in leadership just took a major hit.
underwater 4y ago
> The second effect is related to the fact that companies usually target older people with expensive jobs. In an a big org these are the wizards who have the unwritten cookbooks in their brains. When they leave en masse, a lot of the organizational memory is gone, and expensive operational mistakes of the past are forgotten. These have longer effects that will haunt the company for many years. This can be a good thing. In my experience these people are generally unambitious people who's claim to fame is that they held a job for a long period of time rather than any innate talent. And when you have a majority of seniors who's only value is in being a well of knowledge, they're resistant to any change that reduces the value of that knowledge. This can quash innovation and perpetuates the anti-pattern of information hording.
Tao3300 4y ago
Another terrible effect is that the people who aren't laid off have to onboard the next wave of new hires. I've seen a lot of poisonous behavior as a result of someone having a chip on their shoulder because a friend was laid off, and that can have disastrous consequences for someone who has less experience and needs support.

pclmulqdq 4y ago

I think this is the logic that can make a company like Citadel, which fires 10% of their staff per year, work out well. If you have no expectation of job safety, it attracts a certain kind of person, but there's also no love lost if a layoff round is a little bigger than normal.

xyzelement 4y ago
Exactly. I worked at a Citadel like fund and that's the vibe. The calculus was like this - I'd rather risk being fired than work in a place where low performers are cozy. The reality is that working at a place like that or a FAANG for just a few years sets you up for a great career no matter what happens. So even if you get fired after a few years you are still better off. It's good to have coworkers who can think rationally and make decisions this way, too. It's a virtuous cycle.
- anon20230209 4y ago
  I bet people like that drift into voluntary unpaid overtime.
  - lelanthran 4y ago
    > I bet people like that drift into voluntary unpaid overtime. Drift? I think you mean Sprint.
  - xyzelement 4y ago
    Or, equivalently, "people like that are paid a lot and are engrossed in their careers." When someone makes $500k+, what does "unpaid overtime" even mean?
    - _cenw 4y ago
      I wouldn't want my $500k+ engineer to even remotely get close to burning themselves out.
    - sofixa 4y ago
      > When someone makes $500k+, what does "unpaid overtime" even mean? It means shit work/life balance, thus missing on a lot of people that would want to have it and results in worse productivity (people need time off or they break).
      - cj 4y ago
        > It means shit work/life balance Solution: take a job that doesn't pay $500k. I hate this saying and rarely say it, but "you can't have your cake and eat it too" No one should take a $500k job and expect the culture to be 9-5, clock in clock out. It takes most people 10+ years to earn $500k (often still working their asses off overtime). $500k is a shit ton of money.
    - mynameisvlad 4y ago
      Money doesn’t magically make burnout go away. In fact, it will make it worse, because you’ll keep telling yourself to hold on for the money while your mental health exponentially deteriorates.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

nordsieck 4y ago

> The main effect is that you lose the trust of the top performers. These will be the in the lookout for new opportunities the day after the layoffs are done. If you cut 10%, expect 10% from the top to flee within a couple of years. I don't know, but I imagine that there's a pretty substantial difference between an isolated layoff and an industry wide layoff. Maybe it hits differently when you get to see the sausage made. Where is a top performer at Google going to go? I'm sure there's some companies out there that aren't doing layoffs right now, but most of those probably can't offer FAANG/MANGA salaries.

nostrademons 4y ago
Startups. Top performers at Google, if they've been smart about their finances, are sitting on a few million in the bank and have runways between ~10 years to infinity. They can afford to work for equity for a few years to take a slice of the pie when the company takes over another industry.
- thwayunion 4y ago
  Exactly. My own pet theory about this round of layoffs is as follows. The tech companies spent 2021 massively over-estimating the value of boot camp folks and new grads. They spent 2022 learning a tough lesson. I saw this first hand. So much lost time mentoring low-quality hires. Now they will spend 2023 massively underestimating the value of their senior folks (10+ yoe engineers, scientists with deep domain expertise, experienced people managers, etc.). The problem in 2024-2026 will be that experienced engineers/managers and PhDs who know how to operate well in industry do not grow on trees. Fixing that mistake is going to be a LOT harder than firing a bunch of junior engineers. It may take a decade or longer, and I think the burnt bridges could even be existential for at least one of the FAANGs. (I also bet you'll guess a different one than me, so maybe more than one ;-)) Also: the alternative is not just startups. Smaller companies, sole props, and of course also skiing. I am getting very close to that "~10 years to infinity" number in my accounts. I might do a startup, probably self-funded, likely keep it small. I know who my first 5 customers will be, the work will be fun, I know I can execute well. Doing this at a FAANG would require pulling in 20+ full timers for a year before shipping our first line of code. Totally not worth the ridiculous pageantry when I can do it on my own or with 1-2 helping hands. I'll be making a tiny fraction of what I make today, but the work will be enjoyable and I'll be building what I've wanted to build for the last ten years. Also, I will own the damn thing, which is much more tax-efficient than taking a few years of massive paychecks, and that's something I am more sensitive to now that my money is making so much money. If I were laid off today, I'd need at least double my current comp to return to a FAANG. And even then probably wouldn't.

djkivi 4y ago

> The only way you can safely pull off layoffs is if you ensure that anything you do in the company requires the experience of a boot camp. That means that everyone is fungible and you can easily swap them. This is an interesting way to think of the Leetcode style interview. If you don't require any particular experience and you have built your company's systems in a way that any "competent" developer can join and be effective, layoffs may not be such a big problem.

CharlieDigital 4y ago
This is why React is so popular; not because it is inherently good or performance or has great DX but because of how easy it is to swap one so-so React dev for another so-so React dev.
- mikepurvis 4y ago
  Cynically, aren’t corporate blub languages like Java and Go kind of built on the same notion? That is, they intentionally limit the amount of complexity possible so that there is a low ceiling for mastery and workers are interchangeable.
  - urthor 4y ago
    They're used in that fashion, yes.
  - CharlieDigital 4y ago
    The bar for React and Java are very different. Before you mention that one is a UI library and the other is a programming language: that's my point. There are a lot of FE devs that work backwards from React to JS/TS.
- tukantje 4y ago
  People who are not frontenders regularly look at frontend and think it is easier / simpler to work with. If anything, complexity grew like an atom bomb.
4y ago

atomicnumber3 4y ago

I worked at a bigco that followed this approach. I think the alleged fungibility of programmers is surface-level. Sure - ~any decent programmer can jump into ~any codebase and do your JIRA tickets. But there's a more holistic ownership you miss out on that's going to be the difference between a system aging gracefully and a system becoming a giant hunk of butchered junk that's been one-small-jira-ticket-ed to death over a decade and now needs a very costly and distracting replacement/rewrite. I worked at a different company that did the opposite of this. Programmers were expected to stay either 1 year or 10 years, and you'd be compensated according to which bucket you were falling into. They had excellent retention rates, and the dev team was small, <30 engineers. We never rewrote systems. They had owners who had either written them, or been handed off apprenticeship-style over the course of a year or two from the former master to the new master. Place 1 was a fucking mess of tech debt and had constant incidents that made high value customers mad, execs mad, and oncall engineers mad. One of my coworkers literally went into his first oncall shift, got paged at night three times in two days, and resigned the next morning when he found out that yeah this is just kind of normal and good luck convincing leadership to let us fix it. Place 2 literally never had tech incidents. The worst oopsies were generally related to (it was a trading shop) other people in the market fucking up and resulting in trade breaks that we had to clean up after hours, or exchanges having problems and sending us garbage data that we had to resolve by calling someone from the exchange to confirm order statuses and so on. I only left place 2 because I was moving across the country and they didn't do remote (and still don't, even post covid). I was laid off from place 1.

neilv 4y ago
> One of my coworkers literally went into his first oncall shift, [...], and resigned the next morning I've seen people nope right out of there, and (anecdotally) it's always been an experienced person seeing something that was worse than they should've expected, and having an idea how unusually bad it is.
- outside1234 4y ago
  I did this at Netflix when I saw their (then) HTML mobile app. Yikes. Moving on to option #2.

ptero 4y ago

I am not sure about this (not disagreeing, just not sure). First, 10% of top performers out in 2 years is a normal attrition rate for a 20 year tenure. And I suspect mean time at the company is much lower. But even more important, I think most top performers understand and accept the risk that their employment may end. For example, the company can fold. It is easier for top engineers to accept that because they likely have better connections and can pretty easily find a good job elsewhere. My 2c.

softwaredoug 4y ago

> The second effect is related to the fact that companies usually target older people with expensive jobs. In an a big org these are the wizards who have the unwritten cookbooks in their brains. When they leave en masse, a lot of the organizational memory is gone, and expensive operational mistakes of the past are forgotten. These have longer effects that will haunt the company for many years. Is this true this round? I have noticed a few things: * On the hiring front, much more demand for senior, staff, principal devs, less demand on the junior / intern front. * (Anecdotally) A LOT of junior / new people laid off. It seems in this round companies want a small but elite force, rather than opting for junior people.

napsec 4y ago
Companies have always preferred to hire experienced ICs. They hired juniors because they couldn't find or afford more senior people. It does seem that a lot of juniors are being impacted. But the hiring front likely reflects the fact that there are now more senior folks in the market, and likely that they can offer lower salaries since job seekers have less leverage.

lelanthran 4y ago

> The only way you can safely pull off layoffs is if you ensure that anything you do in the company requires the experience of a boot camp. That means that everyone is fungible and you can easily swap them. Yes, and that's the number one thing successful small business owners learn. The ones who don't learn this aren't successful. You want as many of your staff as possible to be easily replaced. If you're running a restaurant, do you really want the success of your restaurant to hinge on a single talented chef? Nope. You make sure that there's a process so that another few chefs can drop in quickly without changing the menu or the quality of the food. All the other kitchen staff don't do "complicated", they follow instructions. If the business depends on having developers that are in the top 5% (say, one of the criteria to working on the code is understanding Haskell with Monads), the business is at constant risk because the developers are not easily replaceable.

saurik 4y ago
While they certainly have some people who are cogs, all of the small businesses I know are heavily reliant on their owner constantly being around being that person and putting in soul-crushing hours, though, as they can't rely on anyone else and yet simply aren't large enough to have the entire business be built out of cogs. A result of this is that they are businesses that are fundamentally trapped at their current size because of this reliance on their size, and I will claim the only way they grow is by figuring out how to bring on other dedicated strong people to help them get some horizontal scale. I honestly don't think you can try to do the "everyone is a cog" thing until you are at least a medium-sized business.
ROTMetro 4y ago
You are talking about a Franchise model. At a good nice restaurant the individuals recognize me as an individual. You can't just drop someone in and have them know what I like or the service I am used to. You can make yourself a McDonalds, but you better not have any large customer contracts because they are not compatible with the 'franchise' everyone can do everything model (because they expect individualized attention, and often individualized features).

eriktrautman 4y ago

Depends on the environment. In a startup, the top performers often say basically “what took you so long? Glad we can move faster now. And try to hire some more top performers for me to work with.”

waynesonfire 4y ago

> The main effect is that you lose the trust of the top performers. Why? top-performers are most positioned to be aware of incompetence around them and may in fact welcome a housing cleaning. With that said, it's not always easy to identify who's who-- it's possible top-performs are affected or incompetence isn't, which can erode trust.

Tao3300 4y ago
> top-performers are most positioned to be aware of incompetence around them and may in fact welcome a housing cleaning That's thinking from a notch or two below top-performance. Top performers know what's "in the wheel house" for others around them and how to use it optimally. Don't be fooled by local maximums!
- waynesonfire 4y ago
  i don't know if i agree, stocks usually increase after layoffs.
pjmorris 4y ago
There are many factors involved in employee assessment of employer suitability. Steve Blank has observed [0] that when top employees recognize that when an employer moves to assessing them from a purely financial perspective, it's time to go. https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-earth-%E2%80%93-soda%E2%80%99s-are-no-longer-free/ https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

hardware2win 4y ago

Why would actual top performers care this much if they would find new job easily + theyre probably not being targeted

makeitdouble 4y ago
A wild guess: - The people let go might have been good friends or at least people they enjoyed working with. - While they’re not targeted, their coworkers are, they’ll sympathize with the tension. Also that workforce is now doing the same work amount with fewer people. - They are expected to do a lot of education and bringing people up to speed. More churn means more work, and it’s also harder emotionally if you’re not sure how long the person will stay in the company.
- hardware2win 4y ago
  >Also that workforce is now doing the same work amount with fewer people. Not always. Sometimes projects are killed, so amount of work stays the same, or even better - some people are moved to help other teams
willcipriano 4y ago
You typically are asked to work longer hours to make up for missing staff, deal with a lot of nonsense and get "at least you didn't get laid off" as a reward at the end of it. When the money people turn out their pockets (become low performers in their role) no point in sticking around or at very least, no reason to coutinue to be a high performer when the business is signaling its going to be a low performer in regards to the value its going to be able to deliver to you.
- hardware2win 4y ago
  >You typically are asked to work longer hours to make up for missing staff In my country that would be illegal

clnq 4y ago

> The main effect is that you lose the trust of the top performers. These will be the in the lookout for new opportunities the day after the layoffs are done. If you cut 10%, expect 10% from the top to flee within a couple of years. I've been through one of the tech layoffs that happened during the pandemic, so N=1 and all, but this was exactly what happened. On the day of the layoffs, few top performers were affected. It was a classic layoff with an HR email and immediate lockout. Managers of affected people learned later. Some people learned they were being laid off after hearing it in mainstream media first. After 6 months, many best performers (more than 10% in my opinion) have left after struggling with low morale. A lot of company knowledge was lost, portions of the codebase became unmaintainable, projects went from being certainly doable to being in perpetual uncertainty about cancellation. The responsibilities of the the top performers fell on less experienced people, some received promotions but buckled under the pressure in disruptive ways. Two years later, the company is still rebuilding but has obvious competency gaps. There was also difficulty in filling them because HR was disproportionally affected by layoffs. The distrust in management persists and more than a few people are openly talking about leaving. Though the hiring in tech has cooled down which had a chilling effect on people leaving, too.

foobiekr 4y ago

Top performers are pets. You use layoffs to generate excess opex savings in order to retain them. You guys are acting like companies are too dumb to think of these very basic concepts. I have personally witnessed discussions that can roughly be described as “ok we need to add an extra three people in order to fund retention for X.”

ISL 4y ago

Things might be a little different regarding losing trust of top-performers when layoffs happen broadly across a sector. If every semiconductor manufacturer reduces headcount by N%, there may not be much incentive for an engineer to jump ship. If only one of those companies doesn't lay anyone off, though, the dynamics are completely different.

WalterBright 4y ago

> If you cut 10%, expect 10% from the top to flee within a couple of years. If the company was laying off the deadwood and the quiet quitters, the top performers know who they are, and are not concerned about being laid off themselves. Top performers don't particularly care to work with deadwood and quiet quitters, either.

munificent 4y ago
> If the company was laying off the deadwood and the quiet quitters That's a big if, though. Executives doing layoffs also tend to do them quickly and plan them in secret in order to reduce the chance leaks. That means they are deciding who to cut with very limited time and information. They make lots of mistakes. Both times I've been through large layoffs, I saw skilled respected peers get the axe while deadwood didn't. It causes the loss of valuable employees and completely destroys respect for executives who are apparently so clueless that they don't even know which of their employees are worth keeping around.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  The RIFs I've been through did a good job culling the deadwood and quiet quitters. Everybody knew who they were. Of course, every company is different.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  As someone sometimes in that position, if I can get 85-90% accuracy (in both directions), I think that’s about the best I can possibly do in a 500-ish person organization. I hate the false positive (including a good performer incorrectly beyond that required by the depth of layoff) more than anything else for its deep unfairness to the individual, the team, and the company.
projectazorian 4y ago
It's rare that "deadwood" and "quiet quitters" do literally zero work. Even if you feel that your job is secure, you might not appreciate having their work dumped into your lap, especially since there's a good chance that it's not critical-path work. And you might not want to be in an environment where morale is low and trust in leadership just took a major hit.

underwater 4y ago

> The second effect is related to the fact that companies usually target older people with expensive jobs. In an a big org these are the wizards who have the unwritten cookbooks in their brains. When they leave en masse, a lot of the organizational memory is gone, and expensive operational mistakes of the past are forgotten. These have longer effects that will haunt the company for many years. This can be a good thing. In my experience these people are generally unambitious people who's claim to fame is that they held a job for a long period of time rather than any innate talent. And when you have a majority of seniors who's only value is in being a well of knowledge, they're resistant to any change that reduces the value of that knowledge. This can quash innovation and perpetuates the anti-pattern of information hording.

Tao3300 4y ago

Another terrible effect is that the people who aren't laid off have to onboard the next wave of new hires. I've seen a lot of poisonous behavior as a result of someone having a chip on their shoulder because a friend was laid off, and that can have disastrous consequences for someone who has less experience and needs support.